Reporting Botting Activities

[Sankaritarina]

Honestly I don't really want to waste too much time with preambles and some such nonsense, seeing that most likely nothing is going to come out of this anyway.

I am a bit disheartened by the inaction against bots.
I have reported a squad of bots about a dozen times over the past weeks and months and urged other players to do the same, yet they are still going strong. Not one of them has been banned so far and they continue in their merry bot routes every day.
They are super easy to spot, too. All it takes is for someone to go there and watch them go, literally flying the exact same route pixel perfect. They aren't even attempting to hide it, and why would they? Nothing is being done anyway.

So if you want to get a glimpse at SE's inactivity about bots, feel free to visit Twintania and the area just outside of Aporia in Labyrinthos every time the ephemeral Botanist nodes are up and you can watch them go round and round.
You can do the same with the other ephemeral nodes as well, of course.

So yeah, I am super frustrated that nothing is being done against bots that flood the market board with those supposedly rare and hard to come-by resources, which makes it somewhat pointless to farm those for Gil as a player since you'll be competing with bots who like to post dozens of stacks of those every day.

What else can we players do, really, aside from reporting them and watching them continue their bot activity for months without anything happening?

[Sankaritarina]

Since nothing is being done about the bots, I will just update this every day with whether they are still there.
And they are. They are still there, doing their rounds.

[DrWho2010]

Bots are banned in waves, not on individual sightings/reports. You'll see the reports every Thursday or so on the Lodestone about bans. Just go about your business and ignore the bots. You will NEVER actually witness immediate action taken against them.

[Sankaritarina]

Bots are banned in waves, not on individual sightings/reports. You'll see the reports every Thursday or so on the Lodestone about bans. Just go about your business and ignore the bots. You will NEVER actually witness immediate action taken against them.

They have been active for weeks and months, and been reported for as long as that. I have reported them in game, I have reported their lodestone profile and I have reported them in the help center / customer support website.
None of that had any effect on them. They are just not getting banned no matter what we do. A lot of waves have come and gone and yet they still persist.
So this is more or less the only thing I can still think of; a diary documenting the activity of the bots and the inactivity of SE until that changes.

I mean, this is isn't rocket science. You go there, observe them for a few minutes and that's all it takes. They look like bots, they act like bots, they are bots. All it takes is the will to actually do something about them instead of just posting a token effort on the website.

[DrWho2010]

bots and MMOs go together. there's no way around it. nothing you or I or anyone else can do anything about it.

[Sankaritarina]

bots and MMOs go together. there's no way around it. nothing you or I or anyone else can do anything about it.

Anyone else?
SE can do something about it. It's not that hard, really.
Private Servers have no issue fighting bots as long as they are willing to have someone look after the problem. And that's what it really takes: Someone to actually look for the bots in the usual botting places, and to ban them. You could spend more effort to look into what other characters they have interacted with to see where the money is going, but just banning the bots themselves is enough to make it cost-prohibitive as long as the effort is kept up.
But I assume that SE is not willing to go to such lengths; to any lengths, really.
It's super simple to spot them. Again, this isn't rocket science. You just have to go there to see them. That's all it takes.

[DrWho2010]

it's a matter of cost versus return on investment. somewhere along the line someone made a decision that only a certain amount of money will go into mitigating botting issues to a certain extent that the devs consider acceptable. the people/organizations in charge of bots will almost always find ways around banning methods. it's a game of one-up man ship that can only go so far. there is not an unlimited amount of money that can be thrown at the problem to make bots go away forever.

[Arazehl]

Bots have been around since mmos came over on the Mayflower. They are hard to kill. You get rid of one and two more take their place. You'd think after all this time that gaming companies would have invented a way to rid mmos from botting. Like those nonsense names they come up with "Pejdhsa Jagfdos", for example, just a bunch of jumble letters. I wonder why they can't filter nonsense names and prevent them from creating an account. I'd for one, would much rather report a no nonsense name. Easier to type.

The thing is, is that there is not enough monitoring in real time, in game. It's like SE relies solely on us to report stuff like this. I'm sure they get tons of reports everyday too. Yet the task force doesn't seem to have the means to keep up with that many reports on RMT activity and botting. When they do show how many accounts were banned each Thursday and we keep seeing the same name over the bots heads week after, week, it makes you wonder if the task force is a one man show.

The old days have gone where a "live" GM shows up and bans them for cheating and botting on the spot as soon as they see the report come through. I don't think SE even allots the man power to keep up with them. Therefore we can only expect to see swarms of bots in game, sadly.

[DrWho2010]

So it's Thursday and you'll have seen that they terminated about 4-5 thousand or so accounts. The reprieve will be short however as they are probably already back at it because the bot makers just make more to replace those ones.

[ICountFrom0]

There's two FC's full of bots that seem to be doing nothing but farming fates with warriors on hyperion. Keep seeing them, aint sure how the money is made from that.